Trauma is the most misunderstood word in the wellness world.
Trauma is not the event. It is what happened inside your nervous system as a result of the event. This is why 2 people can go through the same experience and one is traumatised and one is not, not because one is weaker or more sensitive, but because their nervous systems processed the experience differently.
Which, incidentally, is the end of the comparing. People spend years deciding whether what happened to them was bad enough to count. It is the wrong question and it keeps a great many people out of help they would benefit from. The measure is not the size of the event. It is whether your system got to finish with it.
And here's what happens when something comes in that you can't handle: you push it away. But energy doesn't stop. It has to go somewhere. And so it goes round and round like a Tesco trolley with a broken wheel. Not leaving. Not resolving. Just forever circling. And that becomes a pattern. A sensitivity. A trigger. The reason a perfectly ordinary Tuesday can feel like a full emotional emergency.
The present moment standing there going: 'Hello? This is just a slightly awkward email?' And 1994 going: 'I recognise this feeling. Code red.'
The circling does not announce itself as circling. It arrives disguised as a reasonable reaction to something small. A tone in a message. Somebody being 20 minutes late. A door closing slightly harder than it needed to. The size of the response does not match the size of the thing, and you know that while it is happening, which is its own particular misery.
And because it does not feel like the past, you look for a present explanation. You decide you are tired, or that they were rude, or that you are simply someone who finds this sort of thing difficult. All of which is tidier than the truth, which is that something old just put its hand up.
What most people try first is avoidance, and it works. That is the trouble with it. You stop opening the email until the afternoon. You stop asking that particular question. You get very good at reading a room before you walk into it, and you call it being considerate.
It works in the sense that the feeling does not come. It fails in the sense that the circuit never gets tested, so it never updates, and the list of things you are quietly steering around gets 1 item longer every few months until your life has a shape you did not choose.
The second thing people try is understanding it. Working out where it came from, which year, who did what. This is genuinely useful and most people overestimate it. You can have a complete and accurate account of the origin and the thing can still happen on Tuesday, because the explanation is filed in one place and the reaction is kept in another.
The feeling itself moves through in 90 seconds if you let it. 9 years of running from 90 seconds of feeling is an extraordinary amount of cardio for something that takes a minute and a half.
The letting is the whole skill, and it is less mystical than it sounds. It means staying put while something uncomfortable happens in your body and not doing any of the things you usually do to make it stop. Not explaining it. Not fixing it. Not getting up. Not sending the message that will get you reassured within 4 minutes.
In practice that looks like this. You notice the flare. You put both feet flat on the floor. You let the breath out slowly, longer than you take it in. And you say to yourself, without any drama about it, that this is a feeling and it is going to pass, and then you wait while it does.
The first few times it will feel considerably longer than 90 seconds. It helps to actually look at a clock, because the body is a terrible judge of duration when it is braced.
And it helps to name it out loud if you are somewhere you can. Not analysing. Just: that landed harder than it should have. Naming it puts a small amount of distance between you and it, which is all you need. You do not have to feel calm. You only have to not act.
What people tend to notice is not that the trigger goes away. It is that the recovery time shortens. The thing that used to cost you the rest of the day costs you an hour, and then 20 minutes, and eventually you find you have had the reaction and carried on with the washing up.
And then, slowly, the trolley stops circling that particular aisle, because something that is allowed to finish does finish. It was never trying to torment you. It was trying to complete.
More like this
What trauma actually is, and why the definition changed everything. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/what-trauma-actually-is-and-why-the-definition-changed-everything
Your nervous system is running the show, here's what that actually means. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/your-nervous-system-is-running-the-show-here-s-what-that-actually-means
TRE, Brainspotting and Flash EMDR, what they actually are, in plain language. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/tre-brainspotting-and-flash-emdr-what-they-actually-are-in-plain-language
If you want somewhere to practise this alongside other people, the Reset Room is a community where you can listen to music activations and meditations, find deep relaxation, and be among other conscious and awakening souls. https://www.annalouwellness.com/community/reset-room